At the Responsible AI in the Military Domain (ReAIM) Summit (4–5 February) in A Coruña, Spain, the message was clear: it is time to move from principles to practice. Convened by Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defence, and the A Coruña City Council, the Summit brought together a diverse mix of states, industry, academia, civil society, NGOs and INGOs, with particular value found in cross-sector dialogue and informal exchanges beyond the panels.
A strong theme was the growing urgency to operationalize ReAIM outcomes into concrete requirements, standards, and shared understandings of what responsible military AI means in practice. While this work must be state-led, success depends on close collaboration with industry and academia, who develop much of the technology now entering military use.
PLATFORM WARS' Marijn Hoijtink and Martine Jaarsma contributed to these discussions through panels and expert engagements.
Marijn Hoijtink participated in the panel ‘Safeguards to Ensure Reliability and Trustworthiness’, alongside Dr. Damian Copeland (Article 36 Legal), Dr. Scott Mongeau (Defense lead at Google), moderated by Dr. Kerstin Vignard (Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy). The panel discussed the need for a continuous certification and verification model to keep pace with non-deterministic systems, and the importance of involving a diverse set of stakeholders throughout the AI system lifecycle. In her contributions, Hoijtink emphasized the importance of incorporating responsibility and legal obligations into the design phase but also warned that not all challenges can be engineered away: “There is a danger that a focus on technical fixes narrows our attention to what is measurable or optimizable, while obscuring the much bigger questions we need to ask: What do we actually want these systems to do? What should they not do? And in which contexts should we decide not to use AI at all?”
Martine Jaarsma moderated the panel ‘AI in Cyber Operations, Electronic Warfare and Information Operations. Decision-making and Decision-Support Systems’, which included Sushil Shah (AWS), Neeti Pokhriyal (RAND), Nicolas Gastón Rozado (Indra) & Alfonso Bello Bocio (Barcelona Supercomputing Center). The panel discussed designing systems for responsible use, focusing on challenges related to data, model collapse, and accountability.
These contributions highlight PLATFORM WARS' ongoing commitment to advancing responsible, accountable, and legally grounded approaches to military AI. As ReAIM 2026 emphasized, translating principles into practice will require continued collaboration among states, industry, academia, and civil society, a process to which our team remains actively and substantially engaged.
